Experian makes strategic investment in location data company PlaceIQ

CEO Duncan McCall said the investment is part of a growth round that PlaceIQ raised after divesting itself of its advertising business (which is being taken over by Zeta Global). He declined to disclose the size of the round, or of the Experian investment.

“It’s a multi-year, strategic partnership, where we will work together to license data [to Experian], and they also proactively become an investor in the company,” McCall said, adding that this “coincided nicely with us divesting of our media business and raising a modest growth round.”

While Experian is best-known for credit reporting, this partnership involves its marketing services business. Under the deal, the Experian Marketing Services will incorporate PlaceIQ’s LandMark location data product into its broader suite of data and measurement tools.

“With the mindset that consumers need to be at the heart of every marketing strategy, brands and agencies need to find ways to reach them and deliver more relevant messages,” said Experian’s president of marketing services Kevin Dean in a statement.” We believe quality data and advanced technology underpin that entire approach, and our collaboration and investment with PlaceIQ reinforce our commitment to helping brands meet that expectation.”

Asked about the direction of PlaceIQ’s business going forward, McCall explained that the company started with a focus on selling location data, and now, it’s gone back to “being a data-only company again.”

“Of course, we would have preferred to have focused on just one business model all these years, but life’s not that simple,” he said.

In his telling, PlaceIQ had to expand into the ad sales business because the infrastructure didn’t exist at the time to incorporate that data into the ad-buying process. Now that the infrastructure is there, PlaceIQ can focus once more on selling location data, which can then be used for targeting on a broad range of ad-buying platforms.